One of the BBC channels over here (BBC4) has been having an Irish week. I caught two most entertaining films, I Went Down and Saltwater. Both starred Brendan Gleeson and Peter McDonald, and both were written by Conor McPherson, who also directed the latter.

Anyone who hasn't seen either or both is in for a treat. They're both very well-written and well-acted (though I had to switch on the subtitles, as a lot of the Irish accents were beyond me). I Went Down is more serious, but not without humorous moments. Saltwater has at least three different storylines which don't hold together all that well, but is very endearing and has one real laugh-out-loud moment as well as a serious undercurrent.

My admiration for Gleeson grows every time I see him: his characters in these films are quite different, and different again from his role in In Bruges. I'd never seen or heard of Peter McDonald before, but he was also impressive in an understated way.

I couldn't agree more about Gleeson, and I'd love to see both of those. They're not available on DVD, so Netflix is no help. I Went Down has a VHS release. Saltwater is McPherson's adaptation of his own play; but nine years after the movie's release, is it likely to come out on DVD now? Probably not.

Gleeson is in three movies due for release this year: Perrier's Bounty, Green Zone, Into the Storm. He plays Winston Churchill in the last one.

In one of these topics I was complaining about the inadequacy of DirecTV's online program descriptions. That's still true, but in one case they (whoever "they" are) went too far in the other direction. I recently watched The Verdict -- not the Paul Newman movie, but a 1946 low-budget b&w murder mystery set in Victorian London, with Sydney Greenstreet as a retired Scotland Yard superintendant, Peter Lorre as a ladies' man(!), and Joan Lorring as a café singer. The Verdict has all the comforting clichés of not only noir but also of period movies -- fog, gaslight, the sound of horses' hooves on cobblestone streets, etc. Great fun. It's a good little mystery, too, which I'm sure I would have enjoyed even more if DirecTV's online description hadn't given away the killer. One sentence to describe the movie, and it's used to reveal the ending! Unbelievable.

I rented a movie called The Void because Amanda Tapping is in it, and it looked to me like one of those disaster-of-the-week movies Sci-Fi shows on Saturday nights. She was good, as she always is, but the movie itself was kind of lame. It looked to me as if a big hunk had been cut out of the last-minute save that those movies all end with. Strange.

I keep forgetting to mention a movie titled Jindabyne, the name of a town in Australia. Four men set out on a much-anticipated weekend fishing trip; but when they reach their spot, the first thing they see is the corpse of a murdered young woman, an Aborigine, floating in the water. They decide not to notify the authorities right away, because that would be the end of their fishing trip. They tether the body to a tree so it won't float away and go off to enjoy their weekend. After a couple of days they return home and call the police.

When the town learns what the men had done, the reaction is one of repulsion and anger. The bulk of the movie is given over to showing the changes in various lives that are triggered by the men's act of insensitivity. The movie has good sustained intensity, a great sense of place, and outstanding performances by Gabriel Byrne as the leader of the four men and Laura Linney as his wife. Strong stuff.